I have been reading a number of accounts recently about a new crop of cattle mutilations taking place in the Southwest. There have also been reports of mutilations in Great Britain of cattle and perhaps water buffalo. The first thing that must be ascertained is whether there is a pedestrian explanation for any an individual case. Such prosaic explanations would include predatory animals killing livestock or ritual animal murder by a cult. To me ritual murder of animals is repulsive but it is not paranormal. In examining the possibilities concerning those reports that are truly anomalous I have come to the following conclusions: It appears that the killers come by air, because in the truly anomalous cases there are no tracks to be seen. There are also no teeth marks and often the victims have had organs and tissues removed with beyond normal surgical precision. There are often reports of both UFOs and helicopters being seen in the area. Helicopters may indicate that humans are involved and it has been speculated that government agencies are involved. Some people think that the government or some parallel agency is testing for Mad Cow Disease. There is some plausibility to this concept, but why as in the recent case below test four calves from one farm? And why the weird coring procedures? It seems more likely to me that someone in a helicopter, likely from the government, has observed or heard that a mutilation has taken place and is investigating it themselves, but as with many questionable government investigations, will not admit to doing so.

This is reminiscent of reports of UFOs from Stephenville, Texas, wherein certain reliable citizens who made radar verifiable reports were hounded by helicopters and told by phone calls purportedly from Air Force personnel to keep quiet.

There is an even stranger explanation of the helicopters as screen memories. It is speculated that the occupants of UFOs are able to replace memories of accidental observers with more prosaic images, or perhaps the human brains of some observers are not able to process seeing a UFO.

Two of the most interesting accounts are here:
CATTLE MUTILATIONS BAFFLE COLORADO RANCHERS
By DeeDee Correll
Los Angeles Times
December 14, 2009

DENVER – Manuel A. Sanchez has ruled out every logical explanation for the
fate that has befallen the calves on his ranch in southern Colorado.

Over the past month, he’s found four calves dead in a way that he cannot
reconcile with anything in his 50 years of raising cattle: eyes and ears
missing, tongues and genitals excised in what appeared to be a series of
fine cuts.

Mountain lions, bears or coyotes would leave messier marks, he said. And
Sanchez found no tire tracks or footprints that would suggest a human
invader — nor even bloodstains he’d expect to find around the carcasses if
someone had butchered them.

“There’s nothing to go by,” said Sanchez, who estimated his financial loss
at $10,000. “I can’t figure it out.”

Costilla County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Chavez agreed: “There’s nothing to
follow up on.”

Besides Sanchez’s calves in San Luis, several cases have been reported near
Trinidad.

It’s not the first time.

In the 1970s, ranchers in eastern and southern Colorado filed more than 200
mutilation reports, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation reports.
The agency investigated, even conducting an undercover operation, but to no
avail.

“It was such a bewilderment,” recalled Tillie Bishop, a state senator at the
time.

But in the mid-1990s, 27 cattle in northern New Mexico were mutilated in 16
months, the Associated Press reported. Again, ranchers found cattle with
genitals removed, tongues cut off at the roots, and eyes and ears missing.
The incisions appeared to have been cauterized, they said.

Again, the reports stopped.

This year, reports began trickling in from southern Colorado.

In March, Mike Duran discovered a cow dead on his ranch near Trinidad, the
udder and vagina missing. “It was like a laser cut,” not a rip, said Duran.
He’d seen such carnage before: In the ’90s, he found a dead cow missing the
same parts.

Sheriff’s investigators were mystified. “I don’t know how to explain it.
They’re just missing. There’s no evidence of blood, of anything being cut,”
said Las Animas County Undersheriff Derek Navarette.

In northeastern Colorado, some Weld County ranchers joke about “coyotes with
scalpels,” the Greeley Tribune reported. Some don’t bother reporting
mutilations anymore because of skeptics, the paper said.

The Las Animas County sheriff’s office investigated another case in March in
which a cow was missing the udder. There was no sign of human or animal
presence. “Unexplainable once again,” Navarette said.

He said his office didn’t order necropsies because of the prohibitive cost.

About 100 miles away, Sanchez found two dead calves in late October. A week
later, a third carcass was found, and the fourth in mid-November.

Four calves, all killed overnight. Their innards gone. Tongues sliced out. Udders carefully removed. Facial skin sliced and gone. Eyes cored away. Not a single track surrounding the carcasses, which were found in pastures locked behind two gates and a mile from any road. Not a drop of blood on the ground or even on the remaining skin.

In his life in the piñon-patched pastures where his father and grandfather raised cattle, the 72-year-old Sanchez has seen

mountain lions and coyotes kill cattle, elk and deer. He’s seen birds scavenge carcasses. He’s heard of thieves slaughtering livestock in the field for their meat. He can’t explain what he saw last month.”A lion will drag its kill. Coyotes rip and tear flesh. These were perfect cuts — like with a laser or like a scalpel. And what would take the waste — all the guts — and leave the nice, tender meat?” Sanchez says, as he nudges his old Ford through rutted trails, rosary beads swinging from his rearview mirror. “No tracks. No blood. No nothing. I got nothing to go by. They don’t leave no trace.”

Every rancher who has reported similar cattle deaths — and there have been at least eight such deaths in southern Colorado this year — uses the same description.

“They just stripped this one,” says Tom Miller, who in March was one of three ranchers near Trinidad who discovered mutilated cattle.

Cow raises the alarm

One morning, he went out to his concrete troughs to feed his herd of about 80 red and black Angus cows and calves. The herd was racing about. A cow that a week before had birthed a calf was bellowing, “raising all kind of devil,” Miller says.

The remains of a calf killed on Manuel Sanchez’s ranch show the killer’s odd predilection for entrails. (Photo courtesy of Chuck Zukowski)

There by the trough — past the locked gate a quarter-mile from U.S. 350 east of Hoehne — was the calf. Its front legs and torso were gone. Its back legs were hanging by hide to a shattered pelvis and a meatless backbone. Miller thought a pack of coyotes had torn into the calf the night before.

Then he saw the ears: sliced off the head in circular, surgical-like cuts. He noticed that there were no tracks. And no blood anywhere.

“If anyone can show me how this happened, I will believe them. I know it’s not coyotes, especially in one night. Only a human or something like that can cut the ears like that,” says Miller, a 72-year-old rancher who was raised on the prairie bordering the Purgatoire River.

“If it was done by people, they sure went out of their way to bother and confuse me. And really, why? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Mysteriously mangled

Colorado Brand Inspector Dennis Williams came out and looked at Miller’s calf. He lives next door; the calf would be the last of three strangely mutilated cattle that he would investigate in March of this year.

“I’ve heard about it. It was weird, to say the least. Totally unexplainable. To me, it looked like that calf had been dropped from a high distance, the way its hips were dislocated and all its broken bones,” Williams says.

That same month, ranchers had called Williams to grisly scenes northeast of Aguilar and west of Weston to investigate mysteriously mangled cattle that had been seen healthy the day before.

To add to the weirdness, Sanchez, Miller and Mike Duran, who found a sliced Red Angus cow near Weston in March, have all experienced similar mutilations before. Sanchez lost cows in 2006 and 1993, Miller in 1997 and 1980, and Duran in 2000 and 1995.

“It’s weird and unexplainable,” says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as “laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch.”

“We’ve seen these before and they are all kind of the same. No one has ever explained it. Northern New Mexico has had some of these same cases, and in those cases they never got any further than we did.”

Predators ruled out

Chuck Zukowski of Colorado Springs investigated three of the eight mutilated cows in southern Colorado this year. The amateur UFO investigator and reserve deputy in El Paso County documents each scene, testing for radiation and scanning carcasses with ultraviolet light.

Despite his extraterrestrial inclinations, Zukowski’s studies — found on his ufonut.com website — fall short of concluding anything paranormal. He seems certain all the animals he studied were killed and drained before they were sliced, which explains the lack of blood found near the animals.

The way the tongues were sliced off in straight lines back behind the teeth indicates it is not a predator kill, he says.

“I’m looking for obvious things,” Zukowski says. “I don’t like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow.”

Sanchez is a salt-of-the-earth-type fellow who put three kids through college running cattle. Yet, he says he and his wife marveled at incandescent blue lights hovering over a ridge near his pastures in July and August. He declined to speculate about the lights.

“I just say the truth and that’s what I saw,” he says.

Duran, on the other hand, is willing to take the next step. He’s looked at it from every angle, he says. If it wasn’t human and wasn’t a predator, he says, there’s only one other option.

“I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here,” he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.

because she is the person who won an Emmy award for her investigative film on the subject in the past and there are many informative articles there on the subject if you scroll down the page.

Another person who has made interesting speculation into possible reasons for an interdimensional or extra-terrestrial visitor too is Carol Rainey in the book Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings of which there is a short review on this weblog. If you think I’m being partial in this article to female investigators perhaps you are right. 🙂

Two books I’ve recently finished are Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings by Budd Hopkins and Carol Rainey and Walking Through Walls by Philip Smith. Both books are about different areas of the paranormal, but they have something else in common which is dear to my heart: the authors are artists and also deeply interested in anomalous events (just like me :-)). It seems that having those interests in common are far from unusual.

Carol Rainey

In Sight Unseen, Hopkins (also a painter) and Rainey (also a filmmaker) explore some truly bizarre experiences a variety of people have had with purported aliens and hybrid alien/humans (transgenic beings). Budd Hopkins has spent many years researching the abduction phenomena and Carol Rainey adds much insight in terms of possible scientific theories which might explain some of the experiences. The story which stayed with me was that of “Mr. Paige”, an odd but gentle individual that came to stay with a family and had an unusual relationship with a child of that family. Was he not human? Hard to say, but very intriguing. I’ve been aware of very odd persons without auras, but are they aliens or transgenic beings? I believe that Jacques Vallee also made mention of Mr. Paige in one of his books.

Budd Hopkins

Walking Through Walls is the story of interior decorator/psychic healer Lew Smith from the perspective of his son Philip Smith, a painter. It gives a window into the world of a child and teenager growing up in Florida with a parent who is immersed in the paranormal. Smith’s writing style is breezy and sometimes very humorous. Especially valuable to me was his description of a session with spiritualist/psychic Sophie Busch. My grandmother often mentioned having gone to see Sophie Busch on several occasions but I hadn’t read of her in the literature before. Smith’s description added an extra dimension to my memories of my grandmother’s experiences as told to me.

Both books demand that the reader suspend disbelief and have an open mind. I think they are both worthwhile to be read by individuals who have a strong interest in the paranormal.